Research problems in data warehousing

The topic of data warehousing encompasses architectures, algorithms, and tools for bringing together selected data from multiple databases or other information sources into a single repository, called a data warehouse, suitable for direct querying or analysis. In recent years data warehousing has become a prominent buzzword in the database industry, but attention from the database research community has been limited. In this paper we motivate the concept of a data warehouse, we outline a general data warehousing architecture, and we propose a number of technical issues arising from the architecture that we believe are suitable topics for exploratory research. 1 Introduction Providing integrated access to multiple, distributed, heterogeneous databases and other information sources has become one of the leading issues in database research and industry #6#. In the research community, most approaches to the data integration problem are based on the following very general two-step process...